How can I optimize my site on a small budget?

Keen Agents from Glendale, CA asks, “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?”

I’ll give you the same answer regardless whether its real estate or any other industry. I think there are a couple of things to bear in mind. No. 1 start with a small niche, don’t say I’m going to rank 1 for real estate or whatever your trophy phrase is. Its probable better to concentrate on individual neighborhoods or individual markets or may be going to a consumer market is a little bit of a big thing to grasp at once. So maybe you want to go for a small sliver of the market, the niche that you can be well known for and then build your way outward. Build your reputation up; build your rankings up as you get to be more well known. The other factor is to be creative. If you have the same brochure way of site as everyone else in the industry, there is no reason for someone to link to you or even remember you. But if you have some sort of compelling thing about your website then, it could be a blog with a distinct voice; it could be you can really make amusing videos; it could be that you come up with fantastic advice, look for some unique angle. So start with a unique niche and try to be creative and how you tackle it and that can probably help you out quite a bit compared to a bunch of different competitors in your industry.

When will the Data in Webmaster Tools be improved?

Grahame Davies from London asks, “When will you commence work on improving the information provided in Google (Webmaster Tools) as per the suggestion you would at the start of the year?”

The answer is the webmaster team up in Curtlin has been working very hard to try to make sure that the information is both reliable and updated more often. You don’t always see that because it’s under the hood but they have made a number of significant improvements to make it so that the information continues to work well and be reliable. So the fact is they have been working on that the whole time and you are already benefitting from that and you will continue to benefit from that, and the infrastructure underneath the Google Webmaster Council is much more stable and much more reliable now if it’s as even a few months ago because of the good work that they have been doing

Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

Lee from the UK asks, “Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?”

Yes it does. Because, we look at the IP address of your web server. So if your web server is based in Germany we are more likely to think that it is useful for German users. That’s not the only country we are going to return you for and we also look at the tld’s, we also look at the .te .fr all those sorts of things. You can also specify in Google’s webmaster’s console and say yes my site my .com or .whatever is about this specific country. You can even do that for specific parts of your site like de.something.com or fr.example.com. So I would absolutely recommend that you use those tools. If you find a great deal in a particular country and if you really want to stay in that country with your web server, I think that’s fine. But if you are worried about it or you want to experiment you can certainly try switching the geographical location of your web server which is essentially changing your IP address and that might end up helping for various countries. So it’s the sort of thing that I would encourage you to experiment.

Will having my software in low quality directories hurt my ranking?

Richard M from Australia asks, “We sell a software product and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?”

Ok, so we are talking only about a software product not about a website. If it’s only a software product then I wouldn’t really worry about it some of those directories are not high quality and we might end up taking out or scoring differently those directories but it won’t hurt your website to link from those software directories. Now website wise I would definitely recommend not submitting your site to 100s of directories but you are talking about a software product. So that’s what you are confining yourself to then I think it doesn’t hurt to go ahead and have your product listed in all those software directories. If any of them are low quality we try not to score them highly, we try not to keep them that high in our ranking or how we crawl the web but it doesn’t hurt your software listed in that directory.

Is over-optimization bad for a website?

Robert from Charlotte has an interesting question. “Is over optimization bad for a website? Ex. Excessive use of nofollow.”

Very good question! First off if it’s your website, you can use nofollow all you want don’t worry this, there is no penalty for excessive use of nofollow, you are not going to get in trouble because of that. On the other hand over optimization, there is nothing in Google that we have over optimization penalty for. But lot of times over optimization is kind of a euphemism for a little bit spamming. Oh my keyword density is a little high, I’m over optimized for keyword density, often means I repeat my keywords so many times that regular users get annoyed and competitors are like where did this content come from. So there is nothing where we say yeah this has the hallmarks of a SEO inside, but if you have over optimized, often you end up with the site that people don’t necessarily like or that looks junky or skuzzy or scummy or just bad in some way. So it’s not as if we are going to say, we detect signs of seo with this site but certainly you can go over bored and have too many keywords, keyword stuffing or hidden text or that kind of stuff. So if you are worried about that, just come back a little bit, edge back and try to make it better for users. But don’t worry about oh I’ve got too many nofollow tags or anything like that. That won’t get you any sort of penalty.

Operation Kill competitor – successful

Google has long claimed no one can hurt a competitor site. We believed Google all these time but we wanted to test it recently. We took a main tail keyword where our client ranks position 12. Our client wanted us to push into top 10 results. So we tried our secret weapon against our competitors. We added a bunch of low quality links from sites deemed low quality by Google. Just added 30 unique links from different sites to each competitor and BOOM within 2 weeks we saw the competitor sites drop 6 to 8 positions. One competitor dropped from position 6 to 14 other dropped position 9 to 17. Well it can be a coincidence but there was no update during the time we tested and those sites were sitting there for about 2 years. So what Google is claiming is truth we don’t know, but we believe we can sabotage a competitor rankings but pushing low quality links. When I say low quality links the links we added are from good pagerank pages and they are strong themselves but come from a negative area.

We wish Google seriously looks into this issue. If you think I am lying we don’t care but it is 100% true we tested and the results are positive. So why disclose a secret weapon? LOL we don’t want to take it as a weapon we just tested we prefer to do SEO search engine friendly way. We tested this to bring awareness to people.

Do you disclose the test results?
Ofcourse NO. We don’t want to keep our client’s rankings and online Business in jeopardy.